Thursday, May 30, 2013

The Wolf GIft--Chapter 11

So. In one week we will be hit with busload after busload of tourists, and my internet will become about as reliable as Windows 8. So if my posting becomes erratic, that's the reason. It's not because I do not love you, my loyal blog readers. It is because I cannot get the FUCKING POST TO LOAD.

So, where were we?

...Right. Ruben is running away from the kids and the people he ate.

You know, it takes a lot of effort to make a rescue and triple homicide boring.

The place that Ruben is going to is called Muir Woods. I just googled it, and it is a real thing. Anne Rice gives us a condensed version of the wikipedia article on the woods, and then moves on. So shall we.

Ruben swings from Sequoia to Sequoia like he's fucking Tarzan. The wood smells nice. He howls, runs around on all fours, and then kills and eats a bobcat.

...did it, like, murder its cousin horribly or something?

Anne Rice describes the eating. In detail.

He stripped succulent muscle from bone, and crunched both in his jaws as he devoured the beast with its brittle yellowish fur, slurping up its blood, its soft innards, the rich sack of its belly, all in all some forty pounds of it, leaving only its paws and its head, with yellow eyes staring at him bitterly.

...how did the fur help him eat it? Was it, like, handing him a knife and fork? Also, I was doing great until we gave the dead bobcat bitterness at its own demise, and then all I could think about was this:

Ruben cleans up, reacts with about ten seconds of horror for acting like an animal, and then walks dreamily through the forest because emotional consistancy is for suckers.

After an hour he gets hungry again.

...WHY? YOU JUST ATE FORTY POUNDS OF BOBCAT. IF YOU WERE ACTING LIKE AN ANIMAL YOU SHOULD BE NAPPING NOW. EXPLAIN, BOOK. EXPLAIN.

He eats a salmon. He eats the eggs out of a bird's nest. He gets a drink of water. He randomly quotes either Exodus or Duteronomy (I can't be assed to look it up right now) which is that part of the bible were all the random weird things are. Specifically this is the part about not cooking a baby animal in it's mother's milk. It's the randomest quote Rice could have chosen.

I'm rapidly approaching a kind of "I don't even" event horison, after which my ability to even will be gone forever.

We get the purplest paragraph in the book so far while Ruben looks up at the stars. Honestly it reminds me of really bad wolf roleplay, where you discover there are ten zillion alternative words for "eyes" and none of them work half as well as actually just fucking using "eyes" to describe eyes.

Ruben thinks about the men he ate. Again: He cracked their skulls open WITH HIS TEETH and licked up the blood, and probably a few pieces of brain matter Rice just didn't want to write about. He wants to cry. Then he starts laughing. Then he thinks about how ugly the woods are. Then he thinks about how pretty they are. The word "divine" is used.

In other words, we're having a full on nervous breakdown.

Well, Ruben's had his violence, he's had his food, he's had a nice drink of water and he's played in the pretty woods for a while. Gee. I wonder what could be next on his "meet my male wolfy needs" list.

Ruben starts randomly dancing and singing. And I mean RANDOMLY. Only the song he's singing is "Simple Gifts" which most of us would know from "Feet of Flames" and "Lord of the Dance", or alternatively from Obama's inauguration. It's one of my favorite songs.

...it was also featured prominently in not one, but TWO Patricia Briggs novels. First in the first full book involving Anna and Charles Cornick, when Bran was asked to sing at the funeral of a guy he killed (it's complicated), and then in Iron Kissed, when Mercy and Sam are at a celtic music thing for Reasons.

I am not saying that Anne Rice ripped off Patricia Briggs, but Briggs was playing in the werewolf sandbox first and it's not THAT common a song.

So Ruben, in his full bloodstained wolfy glory, is singing and dancing in random circles, in the woods, and the ONLY thing I can say in his defence is that he is in the middle of fucking nowhere and the odds of any human being ever seeing him have to be a couple thousand to one.

Which means Anne Rice has no excuse for what happens next.

There is a random light on Ruben's eyelids! He smells something sweet buried under perfume! He turns around! And! It! Is! A! GIRL!

Who somehow found him in the middle of the fucking redwoods, alone, in the middle of the night, with nothing but a flashlight for company.

And yes. She's in a long sleeved blowsy white nightgown. And she's pretty. And she's not at all afraid of Wolf!Ruben, even though he's a bloodstained werewolf singing old Celtic songs to himself in the middle of the fucking woods.

And she's small and fragile and pretty and oh, just so precious. And she's holding a lantern. And he mentally begs her to not be afraid because Ruben hasn't had sex yet, and he'd rather like to.

He starts singing again, watching her. And she watches back, instead of going to get a shotgun. Because...Ruben has saved a lot of people tonight, so it's time for him to get the door prize.

Yeah. Hey, Anne? Since this is going to be Ruben's prime love interest for the rest of the novel, what purpose did Celeste serve? Other than to justify him sleeping with Marchant? Are we really going to throw away the woman so devoted to Rubes that she'd overlook him sleeping with a woman who was then IMMEDIATELY MURDERED afterwards?

Well, we're going to have some kind of preliminary conversation before we go into--

Deep in the pit of his loins the desire rose, surprising him in its intensity. He was growing hard for her. Did she see that? Could she see it? That he was naked, unable to conceal his desire, excited him further, strengthened him, emboldened him.

...I'm going to go get tequila. I can't do this without tequila. Anybody else want tequila?

Also: PLEASE CHANGE RUBEN BACK BEFORE THEY START FUCKING. PLEASE. I HAVE A LOT OF TOLERANCE FOR INTER-SENTIENT-SPECIES RELATIONSHIPS BUT YOU USED THAT UP ABOUT FOUR MURDERS AGO.

And of course, Random Chick just stands there and watches this gigantic werewolf walk up to her house with an enormous, visible hard-on.

Random Chick has not said one. fucking. word. Not this whole time. She hasn't run away, so Ruben takes this to be assent and takes the lantern away from her.

HE. DOES. NOT. KNOW. HER. NAME, and yet he romantically takes her into his big wolfy arms and thinks about how all the beast knows is imperatives. Not making that up. The paragraph flows Lantern, hot paws, romantic taking into arms, imperatives. I think this is supposed to be meaningful. Somehow.

He touches her lips with a paw--THIS IS IN THE TEXT--and then picks her up and carries her off to bed.

A bed that he has never seen before. Because it is in her house, and he's never been in her house because he only met her six paragraphs or so ago, while he was having a mental breakdown and dancing and singing in the rain.

He teleports into her bedroom. I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.

A small bedroom materialized around him. He made out an antique bed against the wall, with a high back of golden oak, and white covers that looked as soft as foam.

No transitional phrases. No description of the inside. Just "Hey, this smells nice and the girl isn't struggling--BEDROOM!"

Random Chick puts her hands all over Ruben's face. The book is careful to point out her facination with his mane and fangs.

He kissed the top of her head, and he kissed her forehead, hmmmmm, satin, kissed her upturned eyes and made them close.

The flesh of her eyelids was like silk. A silk and satin little being, hairless, fragrant, petal soft.

How naked and vulnerable she seemed; it maddened him. Oh, please, my dear, do not change your mind!

THIS. IS NOT. OKAY. OH MY GOD IS THIS NOT OKAY.

I know I like to be sarcastic with the chicks-as-the-door-prize trope, but WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? WHAT THE FUCK AM I READING? The hero killed a bunch of kidnappers and is now LITERALLY BEING DIVINELY REWARDED WITH A GIRL.

WHO WAS NOT IN THE BOOK AT ALL PRIOR TO THIS. THIS IS JUST RANDOM GIRL FOR SEX.

They start to kiss. Ruben still hasn't changed back. Random Chick says "Gently", and Ruben gives what has to be, hands down, the best piece of WTF dialogue in the book so far:

5 comments:

Depending on the breed, sex, and age of the animal, 40 pounds is anywhere from one-half to one-third the bodyweight of a wolf. Assuming that manwolf!Rube weighs about the same as entitledprettyboy!Rube, Our Hero just ate a third of his own bodyweight in meat and bone. Forget sex or a nap, Reuben needs fibre.

And of course, Random Chick just stands there and watches this gigantic werewolf walk up to her house with an enormous, visible hard-on.

Oh don't I fucking WISH Ms. Random had a sleep disorder. I read ahead a few chapters, and it's like every single trope I like in werewolf books gets done SO FUCKING WRONG it's irritating. And out of this entire book, Random Chick is the most useless. Celeste at least defended Rubes from the law. You know what Random does for Ruben so far? SHE COOKS. COOKING AND SEX. THIS IS HER ONLY PURPOSE IN THE BOOK.

I am now convinced that Anne Rice is a dude writing under a psudonym. It's the only explanation for her forgetting how to girl properly.

It takes Random Chick another chapter to get a name. Another two chapters to meet Human!Ruben, which is actually amusing for a few seconds because OH MY GOD HUMAN RUBEN IS A DICK. And then it goes back to being ALL HAIL THE PERFECT WEREWOLF BEING.

Purely functional writing where every character fits neatly into a specific slot can be overdone, but in this case I think it would help with the story.

Reuben is closing a deal with Marchant to buy her house. They finsih the paperwork, send it off to the lawyers, and decide to celebrate by having sex in Reuben's shiny new house. After the sexings Marchant's brothers break in and try to kill her, but instead stab Reuben in the process - But then a werewolf attacks! And kills the evil brothers! And bites Reuben! And then runs away!

Reuben wakes up in the hospital and his testimony matches the evidence at the crime scene (Including the video from the security monitors on the doors and windows). Brothers show up, then a rabid animal interrupts their crime spree and runs off, and then Marchant flees and hasn't been heard from since. Maybe she's in hiding, maybe the brothers had accomplices and they kidnapped her....

Now Reuben has his house, and there's an ongoing hunt for a dangerous rabid animal - Probably more than one rabid animal.

Reuben has his transformations, the kids are kidnapped, all proceeds as written... But after Reuben rescues that poor schoolbus from its bondage he runs back to his house... And boom! There's Marchant! Sexytimes ensue, and she can spend the next few chapters living in Reuben's house and being all mysterious and refusing to answer questions while making with the cooking and sex, which is still sexist as fuck but at least she's an actual named character now.

I am now convinced that Anne Rice is a dude writing under a psudonym. It's the only explanation for her forgetting how to girl properly.

Nah. These rotten cliches about what female characters are for creep into all sorts of heads, male and female. That's what sporking is for, to remind people that "Hey, this stuff here? It's shit. Stop it."